To understand your operations so you can maximize performance, you need to have your data together so you can analyze it to discover issues and opportunities that you need to follow up on. That is the benefit of analytics solutions. The more intuitive and flexible those solutions are the quicker, with fewer errors, you can get to the heart of the matter.

Telerx, a healthcare-/consumer-packaged goods-focused teleservices firm has achieved such productivity gains, and boosted quality through error reduction with HardMetrics Performance Manager (HPM), HardMetrics’ on-demand analytics solution. So successful is this application, which it implemented in spring 2009, has been that the company, which has six U.S. and Canadian contact centers, is expanding HPM use from customer care to other departments. These centers plus those in Latin America, Europe and the Philippines house some 2,000 agents and supervisors.

Telerx had been finding that analyzing customer contact and call handing information was presenting a significant challenge because multiple, disparate contact center management systems are involved, reports Diana Helfinstine, senior vice president of operations. The outsourcer hosts several contact center management systems and it may or may not have complete information coming from our clients’ automated call distribution systems.  Billing structures are often different as well.

Despite the disparate nature of this information Telerx had to frequently create reports such as overviews of the business and trend analysis. A lot of resources were involved in taking this information, pulling it together and formatting it so it made sense.

There was also the potential for human error and inconsistencies. Whenever you have humans interacting with data there’s always a chance for mistakes to be made and one person’s interpretation might be different than someone else’s, the Telerx VP points out. That makes a consistent point of view much more difficult to obtain.

“Although we have some internal automation, when you are combining various data elements it is still a somewhat manual process,” explains Helfinstine. “And anytime you have someone doing a manual function you are paying for it.”

To alleviate this costly and inefficient process and mitigate the drain on staff resources, Telerx initiated a large and expensive data warehouse project. Early in the process, it was suggested that the firm consider HardMetrics HPM to visualize, investigate, and report on the links between the call center and business performance. That recommendation came from by someone that had been using the HardMetrics solution for a couple of years in a similar environment and could validate first hand what the benefits were.

“We have looked at performance management systems over the years and they are typically highly engineered, very expensive systems that require a lot of resources,” says Helfinstine. “When HardMetrics was recommended we [investigated it] and were extremely impressed with the simplicity of the system and the ability to implement it in a fairly quick timeframe. We also felt comfortable with the HardMetrics team and what they were able to do. Besides having a very good tool to use we felt like this was a vendor that we could build a relationship with.”

“We also liked the company’s approach to training and knowledge transfer,” she added. “We were looking for a tool that would enable us to be independent and do the heavy lifting for us. If you think about it, a lot of vendors set themselves up as the expert and you are very reliant on them. In this case, HardMetrics took the opposite approach and they made us the expert. It’s a really good approach.”

Another appealing facet of the HardMetrics’ solution is that it avoids expensive and system-clogging bells-and-whistles. Instead it is focused on a core set of valuable key solutions.

“This makes it very easy for a company like us with multiple sites to be able to get this up and running, deploy it and have people actually use it,” says Helfinstine.

Telerx initiated the HardMetrics project in April 2009 and had it live by mid-May. She used both her IT team and brought in additional IT resources.

Telerx is already experiencing some advantages with the new software. It has reduced the number of people that have to be involved in report creation. In many cases this translates to an actual cost reduction while in others this allowed the firm to leverage their employees’ skills more productively elsewhere.

The software has also eliminated human errors. The beauty Helfinstine says of the HardMetrics tool is that once you have your mapping to the correct data elements, the opportunity for human error is almost nonexistent because the data is coming directly from that data sources.

“HardMetrics simplified the process of bringing many of our data sources and data elements together and allows us to easily add new ones with a drag and drop configuration process,” said Helfinstine. “We can now compare and contrast business critical data elements in seconds—in a single view—using dashboards, scorecards, actionable reports and visualization objects. We have moved from reporting and its associated challenges and risks to sophisticated and trusted analytics in a very short period of time. [In contrast] using a manual process, we used to spend hours developing reports and graphs for all the things clients want to look at.”

As the company spends more time with the HardMetrics software, more ways of using it are being uncovered. Telerx brought both payroll and financial reporting system information into HardMetrics.

 

“The ability to correlate various pieces of data and slice and dice your financial information in a very finite manner is something that is easy to do with HardMetrics,” says Helfinstine. “In the future our plan is to bring a lot of additional data elements into the system so it will become even broader and enhance our ability to analyze the business.”